Cairo’s Tahrir Square listens to President Hosni Mubarak address the nation on 10 February 2011. He resigned the following day.
Photograph: Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

On 25 January 2011 hundreds of thousands of protesters started to gather in Tahrir Square and planted the seeds of unrest which, days later, finally unseated the incumbent president, Hosni Mubarak, after 30 years of power.

But while the nature of each pro-democracy uprising, and their ultimate success, varied wildly from country to country, they had one defining characteristic in common: social media.

At times during 2011, the term Arab Spring became interchangeable with “Twitter uprising” or “Facebook revolution”, as global media tried to make sense of what was going on.

But despite western media’s love affair with the idea, the uprisings didn’t happen because of social media. Instead, the platforms provided opportunities for organisation and protest that traditional methods couldn’t.

In the words of one protester, Fawaz Rashed: “We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.”

Fawaz Rashed (@FawazRashed)

‎"We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world." #egypt#jan25

Nowhere was this clearer than in Egypt, where social media was well embedded in the culture of the country’s overwhelmingly young population – 60% under the age of 30.

Their online revolutionary spirit was infectious for those watching from afar. According to the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam the number of tweets posted about Egypt – many using #Jan25 in homage – jumped from 2,300 to 230,000 per day the week before Mubarak stepped down on the 11 February. Foreign Policy magazine declared the Egyptian revolution the Twitter “news moment” of the year.

But feelings of revolutionary success were short lived as Mubarak’s government was replaced by the equally repressive Muslim Brotherhood, before he was ousted by a military coup in July 2013. Eventually, the party was replaced by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, under whom state repression, intimidation and attacks on press freedom has gone from bad to worse.

A conflicted tool

The same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart

Wael Ghonmin

Wael Ghonmin is one of those credited with kickstarting the Egyptian revolution with a “simple, anonymous” Facebook page: We are all Khaled Said, set up in homage to a 29-year-old man who had been tortured to death by the police.

It gathered 100,000 followers in three days and quickly became the most followed page in the Arab world.

But then “the euphoria faded, we failed to build consensus and the political struggle led to intense polarisation,” said Ghonmin at a recent Ted talk. Social media quickly became a battlefield of misinformation, rumours and trolls – “the same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart,” he said.

Protesters who were voicing their support for events five years ago were told by some Twitter and Facebook users that they should be ashamed for the years of turmoil that had followed, and that the revolution was a crime.

Social media revolution?

So can the events of the past five years ever accurately be described as a “social media revolution”?

Social media is not an alternative for physical expressions of freedoms in public space

Leil Zahra, activist

For Leil Zahra, an activist who stationed herself in Tahrir Square and who worked on anything from food distribution to working with the anti-sexual harassment task force, the term is insulting and reductive.

“It was [about] much more than those who had access to Twitter and Facebook. If it wasn’t for the working class and the marginalised thousands this revolution wouldn’t have happened,” he said.

Instead he likes to think of it as a “popular uprising” across a subsection of “classes and realities”.

“It was a time of great human beauty… demonstrated in the solidarity and collectively putting life at stake for that idea of a better tomorrow. On the other hand it brought a very graphic reality of the system’s violence and how far a human being can go.”

When asked to pinpoint two tweets – one that sums up his life five years ago and one from today – you get the sense that it was the dedicated activism and not Twitter per se that made change happen.

“It is a tool, and it is still of very good use, but it is not an alternative for physical expressions of freedoms in the public space,” he said.

#FreeAlaa

In the turmultous years since the revolution, the power of social media has not ebbed, but its uses have changed. For many activists, Twitter and Facebook have become tools to help keep a spotlight on those, like Khaled Said, who lost their lives in the uprising, or who have since been imprisoned by the authorities.

One of the most famous to have lost his freedom is Alaa Abd el Fattah, an “an icon of the Egyptian revolution” who was sentenced to five years in prison in October 2014 for his role in protests the previous November.

The official charges include “assaulting a policeman and stealing his walkie talkie”, but for his supporters, who have been rallying around the hashtag #FreeAlaa, it is more simple: he was arrested for his dissent.

The plight of El Fattah and 25 others has since become known as the Shura Council case. Many more of those charged have been sentenced to three years or more in jail.

But Zahra believes that in an increasingly repressive media environment means that activists need be careful about what they say online.

“Social media is a space for expression beyond those parameters of control, and for many it is a very powerful. But we should keep in mind that they are predominantly privately-owned and abide by the rules of those corporations,” he said.

The truth about Twitter, Facebook and the uprisings in the Arab world

Read more

As today’s anniversary approached the authorities, worried that social media would be used once again to organise more protests, arrested three Facebook admins and accused them of using the “networking website to incite against state institutions”. For many of Egypt’s activists, the fight for the revolution lives on.